From Hermione on the southern shore of the peninsula came Lasus, who, as a theoretical and practical musician, did much to develop the dithyramb. He was the teacher of Pindar and, under the cultivated tyrant Hipparchus, was a rival of Simonides in Athens. The other poet, Pratinas, came from Phlius, geographically within the northwestern corner of Argolis, although the independent Phliasians long maintained their autonomy. The city lay in green meadowlands high among the mountains on the grassy banks of the Sicyonian Asopus which, according to local belief, was generated by the Carian Meander coming under the sea to link the two sides of the Ægean together, as the Alpheus, on the other side, united Sicily to the mother land. Although Pratinas was inevitably drawn by the lure of the intellectual to live at Athens, he stands out as a Dorian poet. He is known as the first writer of the satyr dramas, one of which it was for a while the custom to add to the trilogy of tragedies, and he competed even with Æschylus. The literature of Ionian Athens lacked one element which developed among the Æolians and Dorians. The more independent life of Dorian women called forth two poetesses in the Peloponnesus. One of these lived at Sicyon. This city, lying on the Asopus, which comes tumbling down through the deep ravine from Phlius, early became Dorian. Once included in the widespread kingdom of the Agamemnon of tradition, it was now independent, now dependent on Argos or on Sparta. With the mountains of the Peloponnesus around it and the Corinthian Gulf and Parnassus in front, it is beautiful for situation. Its rich treasure-houses were among the notable sights at Delphi and Olympia, and it was famous for its schools of painting and of sculpture. Here Praxilla, the Dorian poetess _par excellence_, lived in the fifth century B. C. The fame of her dithyrambs, a few fragments of which have reached us, survived her, and she was deemed worthy of a bronze statue by Lysippus, a later compatriot. In aristocratic Argos itself another woman, Telesilla, was honoured both as a writer of choral hymns for maidens and as a heroine in war. Pausanias adds to the Herodotean account of the Argive men massacred by the Spartans in Hera’s grove the story of how Telesilla manned the walls with old men, boys, and slaves, and then drew up the Argive women for actual conflict with the Spartans and repulsed them, partly by stout fighting, partly by the shame inspired in them by the thought of contending with women. Pausanias saw, furthermore, a carved relief representing the warrior poetess, her scrolls scattered at her feet as she gazes at a helmet which she is about to put on. Kydias, also from Hermione the home of Lasus, wrote, in the first half of the fifth century, love songs highly esteemed by Plato.